If by "works" you mean "has a familiar and mostly-polished interface", then I would agree. If you like Mint so far, go with that. To give a comparison on the "other end" of the user experience spectrum, try Crunchbang. It is the same underlying ecosystem as Mint (Debian), but builds itself out of a handful of more minimal components. It's my go-to dev distro because it's just enough to get work done in, and nothing more.
If you've tried "the big common ones", then you've hit 90% of the mainstream options. If you need something special, unique or custom beyond those, you definitely would have identified those needs in your post.
- Package management: DEBs were sooo much easier to deal with than RPMs.
- Hardware support - usually everything just seemed to work or there was a forum discussion with a solution on what to do about it.
- Good variety of included packages.
- Excellent support forums, even if you are doing non base Ubuntu stuff there's probably a discussion a 'google' away that covers whatever issue you have. So, even tough Canonical does not-so-pleasant things to the UX, you can easily find ways to fix your experience and back to developing.
If you have similar positive experiences with Mint, why switch? Figure out what you are missing or looking for first.
I've been using ArchLinux for a while, but have been slowly moving to stock debian.
I like Arch, but it takes a while to get configured. It seems more suited to an installation that is going to be highly customized anyway, so starting from scratch makes sense.
Most of our developers seem more comfortable with ubuntu/debian than Arch as well.
There are a lot of reason why I love it though. Very quick boot time on a spinning disk and small memory foot print when running. I run awesome wm (window tiling manager) which is great for coding with a small laptop screen.
I am not sure if I would run it on a production server though.
Then all the windows managers are a mere apt-get install ... away.
The only thing that irks me is the driver support for laptop peripherals. Still can't get MBP to run as cool and for as long on battery with Linux as with OS X. I've given up on VmWare as it seems to churn the CPU even doing very little.
I recently got a Macbook Air (the new 2013 one) and it's working out pretty well. Rather than deal with a desktop Linux OS I've got everything running in VMs and either work through them or cloud based remote servers.
For casual computer use (web browsing, email, etc) I use native apps. For software dev I use a combination of SSH to VMs/remote servers and native text editors accessing shared filesystems (mainly sshfs).
I still much prefer my desktop (a real keyboard is always way better) but at this point my laptop is tolerable enough that I can roam around and actually get work done.
Take this example, some years ago I tried Debian, SuSe, Mandrake, and a few others, ended up using Gentoo and it is still my distro of choice, I won't say it's the best for everyone, but so far has been the best for my needs.
If you're selling into an enterprise that requires RedHat, Oracle etc, then possibly CentOs for cheaper development costs as compared to developing on RedHat itself. Those are in the RPM world.
So many other ways to slice this pie, depending on what you need and how involved you want to be with your disto as opposed to whatever it is you're doing.
You don't want to waste time setting up X.. resolving dependencies.. making things 'work' that should 'just work'.
So, whatever solves that?
Personally, I've gone for the latest available release of Ubuntu where possible, although recently i've started using OS X and shelling into a linux machine to do any necessary work that requires it. I find OS X provides a decent *nix underneath and with the addition of http://brew.sh/ - makes it a viable choice for me over a Linux set up.
Anyway at work I run Ubuntu 12.04. Mostly because I find it to be a little more forgiving than Debian out of the box.
At home a run Debian Sid. I ran Wheezey for almost a year and when it was released as stable I switched to Sid. My only real issue is the lack of the full Firefox.. Right now I'm pretty sure I have the one installed from a mint repo. Ice Weasel just isn't the same. For example when using outlook it would set my spell check to Bolivia Spanish. Despite the default being English.
This 100%.
I started out with Madriva after being a lifelong MS user. It was a steep learning curve. I had to learn how to compile and install stuff from source. While not a bad thing to learn, for a Windows user, it was totally foreign to me.
After several years enjoying Mandriva I switched over to Mint and thought, "Good lord, where have you been my whole life!?" It was like night and day. I actually got a lot more comfortable using terminal with Mint then I ever was with Mandriva. I also switched over to Gnome from KDE and think its much better than KDE.
It's Debian based with minimal extra bullshit, has a super-friendly config script right out of the box on first boot, and uses OpenBox as the WM. Very snappy and minimalist distro.
Crunchbang has been a great OS so far. The stability of Debian but OpenBox is a much more pleasant experience. Loving it so far.